The Mad Parson

I mentioned earlier–and rather snarkily–that I equate the Madoff scandal with Social Security.  Both are criminal Ponzi schemes, but the gubbermint gets away with it because it’s. . .well, the gubbermint.

This article indicates, with both economic detail and yummy snark, how I’ve my equivocation of the two is unfair.

To Madoff.

Ouch.

What is it about Christmas that never loses its traction, its grip, its oomph?

In the film No Country for Old Men, the assassin Anton Chigurh personifies death.  Although the body count is admittedly high, Chigurh doesn’t kill indiscriminately–there is a rationale, weird moral code to who he kills and why.  He’s not random and he’s not stoppable.  The message?  Death is coming, and there’s nothing you can do to impede it.  The calculus of dying is the only constant in this universe.

And not just the deathbed, mortuary, execute-the-will kind of dying, either.  Every time a soldier spend the holidays overseas, every time the divorce papers are signed, every time the test comes back positive, every time we grieve graveside, every time violence tears at our community, every time the gnawing regret eats away at us, a little something in us dies.

It is into this world of dying that a child is born.  If we measure Christmas by Currier & Ives or “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”, we sell ourselves short, because this child isn’t born into cozy pleasantries or bucolic landscapes.  This child is born into the prick of straw, the stench of manure, the cold of the stable, the loneliness of hearing, “There isn’t any room for you here.”  This child is born into darkness.

That’s the good news of great joy.  That’s why Christmas sticks.  Because Christ born into his darkness is Christ born into our darkness.  Every time we feel alone, every time the wheels fall off, every time we take one step forward and three steps back, every time our friends think we look perfect and we think, “If they only knew!”–every time, Christ is there.  That’s one thing we mean when we say on Sunday that Christ descended into hell–and then the third day he rose again from the dead.  Christ descends into every dark cranny of our lives, bringing light and life to what we thought was unreachable.

The Gospel According to the Goo Goo Dolls sayeth: “Take these words and sing out loud, ’cause everyone’s forgiven now.  ‘Cause tonight’s the night the world begins again.”  That’s why Christmas sticks.  Christmas maintains its power, its hold, its magic, precisely because we still need light in darkness, balm in hurt.  Christmas maintains its traction because our need to be saved is still here.  All of the advertisements would have us believe that if Christmas isn’t bright and cheery and expensive, it isn’t Christmas.  But those advertisements ring hollow when heartache comes around.  It is in the bleak and lightless moments of our lives that Christmas reigns supreme.  Death doesn’t get the last word and there’s no place so dark that Christ can’t reach it.  That’s good news of great joy.  Christmas sticks because tonight’s the night the world begins again.

I liked Quantum of Solace.  I liked it better the second time I saw it.  I liked it even better the third.  But, for me, it doesn’t rise to the level of Casino Royale.  It’s an unwritten rule with Bond flicks: The first film with a new Bond blows your hair back, but the sophomoric effort is. . .well, sophomoric.  Daniel Craig’s first outing was stylish and intense.  He oozed conflict–both internal and ex.

One of his conflicts was between being tough and getting the job done, and being vulnerable and having a relationship.  Nowhere was that seen more that after the stairwell fight with Obanno’s men.  Vesper is traumatized by the affair, and when Bond gets back to the room after his card game, he finds her sitting in the shower.  The water is pouring over her and she is nearly catatonic; Bond enters the shower and just puts his arm around her, sheltering her and comforting her simultaneously.

Today is the eighteenth anniversary of my baptism into Christ, and this scene is what I think of when I think of my baptism, because this is the point where Vesper enters another world.  She was trucking along, minding Her Majesty’s monies, when all of a sudden she is inaugurated into a world she didn’t even know existed.  The shower scene is the turning point when she exits one world and enters another.  And so it is.

But it’s not the point at which she leaves a troubled world and steps into some sort of Pollyanna utopia.  That’s what a lot of folks think Christianity is–an escape from the hard realities of life.  In fact, it’s really just the opposite.  Vesper’s eyes are opened to a troubling scene and she herself steps into a new place of greater love and greater pain.  The stakes are higher, but so are the rewards.  Vesper sees pain that she’s never seen before, but she also experiences acceptance that she’s never experienced before.  That, too, is my experience with my baptism: After I was baptized, I saw things that I had never seen before.  Oh, sure, I had laid eyes on difficult things and people before, but after my own shower at the font, I saw them differently.  I was inaugurated into a crazy new place of greater trouble and greater love–and my baptism promised me that the greater love wins.

I had a Bond figure of sorts at my baptism, too.  The only thing is, the guy comforting and sheltering me at my shower doesn’t use a Beretta and he doesn’t lose.  I don’t know if he makes martinis, although I bet they’re hard to beat, if he does. And that’s where Vesper’s baptism fails.  While it ushers her into a new world, it ultimately doesn’t deliver her from the rage and pain end of it.  Mine does.  My water-dousing at the font promises that I’ll get through the rage and pain into a place full of something lasting and different: Love.  Grace.  Peace.  And, unless I miss my guess, martinis that are (ahem) out of this world.

More unconventional Christmas music here.

I love this tune.  For one, it absolutely rocks.  Gwen Stefani just blisters this song.  But for another, it really captures the spirit of the season.  “Oi to the World!” is part West Side Story and part Joyeux Noel.  Two gangs go at each other, but Christmas Day brings some sense of peace and unity.  The chorus is, “If God came down on Christmas Day, I know exactly what he’d say.  He’d say. . .oi to the world!”  Of course, “oi” is a play on “joy”, so you get the idea.  God comes down and wreaks joy on everyone, which is pretty much what actually happens.

But another reason I dig this tune is because of its punk-ness.  “Oi” is a colloquial exclamation in Britain, Ireland, and Australia that indicates surprise.  It is unrefined slang, usually heard with Cockney, Aussie, or Geordie accents.  It is a street smart term that tends toward the anti-authoritarian.  Of course, punk rock itself is anti-authoritarian to the point of being anarchist at times–and that’s precisely what is so Christmas-y about this tune.

The Christmas scene is not a bucolic one, although that’s how it’s usually played.  Churches that do a nativity scene miss the mark more often than not.  They don’t pile on fertilizer so that it actually smells like a manger.  Or turn off the heat so everyone is freezing cold.  Or convey Mary as a scared teenage mom.  No, however romantic we try to portray the Christmas scene, it just isn’t.  And I’m glad, because that would be more of the same, and we can’t handle more of the same.

The Christmas scene is, however, the invasion of our world by God Incarnate to best the powers of evil and establish his kingdom of grace once and for all.  That means defying the authorities–the powers of this world that are deeply invested in the status quo of hierarchy and power and addiction and so on.  Or, let me put it this way: Christ wasn’t crucified because he was born in the sticks, or conceived without a human father, or adored as the hope of many.  He was crucified because he threatened everyone and everything that wants power, that wants control.  He was crucified because he turned the world on its head and made the first last and the last first.  That’s the strident passion captured in punk rock.  That’s what makes this such a great Christmas song.

Oi to the world.  The Lord has come.

. . .until “No Line On the Horizon”.

Remember that scene in the first Star Wars movie–or is it the fourth!?–where the Millennium Falcon is being sucked in by the Death Star’s tractor beam and the Falcon is shaking and rattling and everyone on board is freaking out as they realize they are being taken hostage?  Facebook is the Death Star.  I’m the Millennium Falcon.  For an extrovert like me who derives his energy from being with other people, the latest in social networking sites is kind of like freebasing heroin:  When can I get my next fix?

Part of the attraction is catching up with people I haven’t heard from in forever.  But another part of it is the prospect of keeping up with what people are up to with accuracy that is tough to match with phone calls and emails.  Glance over at your Facebook page and see what your pals are doing today; you don’t have time for sustained conversation with all four billion of your best friends, so taking a quick gander at Facebook keeps you current.

Twitter keeps you quantum.  Twitter is a social communication tool whereby folks “tweet” their account and it updates automatically to everyone on their respective lists.  One person tweets “Having a latte at Salem Starbucks” from their laptop or their cellphone, and everyone who is “following” that person immediately gets that message on their page, and on their cell if they have it set up that way.  You can now stay in touch with your pals in realtime.  Instant messaging has become instant relationship.

That sounds really cool.  After all, who doesn’t want to know that Hester is on his ninth load of laundry?  Pretty compelling, I know.  And there are certainly some awesome applications for this kind of stuff.  For instance, if you, dear reader, get a message from your old school chum that she’s having a gingerbread latte at the Salem Starbucks, you can join her for a sip.  Or, if you, dear reader, get a tweet that Hester is on his fourth consecutive day of doing laundry, you can drop by and help him out.  It’s a wonderful thing.

With two caveats: The first is how easy it is to let a supplement become the substance.  Applications like Facebook and Twitter are marvelous ways to keep up with friends, but they can quickly become the main medium of connecting–and that’s not a good thing.  When kept to communication tools whereby you can email and post pics and maybe do a little business if your industry is given to this sort of thing, then that’s cool.  But when a person starts using these applications as the primary means of interacting with other persons, then something has substantially changed.  Humans are inherently relational beings; we’re just calibrated that way.  And that calibration is built upon physical proximity.  That’s not to say that we have to be vis-a-vis every single time we have a conversation–that’s about as plausible as Boy George being simultaneously drug-free and mascara-free.   But it does mean that our relationships are predicated upon physical proximity and everything else is addendum.

A corollary to this is I often hear people hypothesize that one day we’ll just stream church services to our laptops and no one will actually go to a physical sanctuary anymore.  I don’t buy it.  For one thing, we can already do that with Joel Osteen infomercials dressed in religious language.  For another, that solitudinous consumption of religious material just doesn’t fill that gnawing hole in our spirits that longs to be in the presence of both God and his children.  It’s the same dynamic that drives people to spend way too much money to sit in the freezing cold in an NFL stadium and watch little dots run around on a green square when it would be far cheaper and more comfortable to stay at home and catch the game close up in high definition.  We just want to be with each other.  And technology apps help with that, but they don’t replace it.

The second caveat about such possibilities is the risk of unchecked self absorption.  Our Western civilization, with its primacy on individual rights and liberties, is already always at risk for egocentrism of the first degree.  Add to that mix the ability to instantly tell four thousand people that you–yes, you!–are engaged in the eminently important and utterly relaxing task of washing your cat, and that egocentrism is magnified.  There is something about MySpace and Facebook and Twitter and so on that makes us think that people actually want to know if we’re shining our shoes, watching the Redskins game, or visiting the loo.  Maybe some people do.  But a healthy dose of humility wouldn’t hurt, either, and social networking/communication applications magnify just the opposite.

The one hundred twenty second Psalm begins, “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go up to the house of the LORD’.”  I think there are two things highlighted in that verse: The need for proximate human interaction and the humility that goes with focusing on God.  Those are two things that our souls long for and thrive on.  We are at our level best when we are together and focusing on Christ.  That’s when the questions are answered and the needs are met.  Technology can be a tool in that effort.  It can’t replace the effort.

When Bernie Madoff does it, it’s a criminal Ponzi scheme.  When the United States government does it, it’s Social Security.

And with the same eventual results.

Here’s an intriguing (and cool!) video graphic on American immigration from 1870 until now:

Immigration to the US, 1820-2007 v2 from Ian S on Vimeo.

Wow. You have to wonder about our immigration policies and how well they approach these dynamics. You also have to wonder if our Christian convictions line up well with those policies.

Corruption is so prevalent in human societies that at times it seems verily grafted–um, better say “woven”–into our communal fabric.  Misuse of power, pay-to-play, rank bribery, opposition blackmail, and cronyism have been around ever since that first gathering of cavepeople did rock/paper/scissors to choose a leader and came to a standstill because two of the three hadn’t yet been invented.  It pays, if you don’t mind the pun, so well that the name of the master of political manipulation became an adjective.  Surely, to get ahead these days, you have to be at least a little “machiavellian”.

King David, Pontius Pilate, Lady Macbeth, Warren Harding, Huey “the Kingfish” Long, and countless others form that unholy pantheon of gifted leaders, both mythical and real, who abused their power.  During Tip O’Neill’s Speakership in the House of Representatives, the Republicans consistently decried Democratic abuse.  Since the Republican Revolution of 1994, the Democrats have sounded that converse cry.  Now, the tables turn yet again, as Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was yesterday arrested for being a slimly bottomfeeding thuggish goon aspiring to join said pantheon.

Christ’s holy Church isn’t immune, alas.  The genesis of the Protestant Reformation was the corruption of the Roman Church in the sixteenth century.  The Roman Catholic hierarchy was literally selling certificates of salvation–an abuse of power they didn’t even possess.  (Although, let’s be honest.  Wouldn’t that be awesome if you really could buy salvation?  What a freakin’ stocking stuffer!)   The archreformer Martin Luther and the second generation reformer John Calvin approached the problem with seriousness, but with different results.  Luther focused on converting leaders to strident and protestant Christianity.  His thinking was that if leaders were Christian, they would write laws and pursue policies that created Christian nations.  The logic was borne out of passages in the New Testament where a man would convert and his whole household would be baptized.

Calvin saw the problem differently.  Having apparently listened to the likes of Motley Crue and Jay-Z, Calvin didn’t think we could depend on the virtue of any one person.  Everyone is tainted with sin, so thought Calvin, so external measures have to be taken to prevent corruption.  Calvin devised a system of government with widespread democratic involvement and checks and balances to prevent any one person from accruing too much power.  And, hey, if you ain’t got much power, you cain’t abuse it.

Half a millennium has passed.  Both approaches have been tried more times than Madonna  has gyrated on stage.  What’s worked?  Well, both.  And neither.  Some Christians have done well as leaders, while others have been abysmal.  Sometimes the devolution of power throughout government checks the appetites of politicians, and at other times it enables more widespread abuse.  Both work in some circumstances, but neither approach is a guarantee.  Does that mean there’s no hope for getting rid of the dastardly Rod Blagojeviches?  No, it just means we need both approaches simultaneously.  We need ethical leaders operating in an efficient and democratic system.  Having one without the other is like having Elvis without amphetamines.

And the only way to achieve that convergence is with an active, informed, and ethical voting population.  At the end of the day, high diligence on the part of the constituency concerning the writing of laws and the election of leaders is what will get us out of this quagmire.  Otherwise, we will stay within that long line of societies fleeced by the very persons we’ve chosen to serve us.